Glimpse along the west bank of Green River between Green River Station and Burning Rock cut, showing to good advantage the wall-like and castellated forms on the opposite side of the river. Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1869

Along the west bank of Green River between Green River Station and Burning Rock cut. Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1869

Union Pacific line along the west bank of Green River between Green River Station and Burning Rock cut. Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1869

Granite Cut, near Dale Creek Bridge, about 3 miles west of Sherman[, Wyoming]. The road has been drilled and blasted through a close, compact, and massive granite that is susceptible of a high polish, much like the Scottish syenite. Albany County, Wyoming, 1869

Tunnel No. 2, the longest on the road, 770 feet in length, cut through reddish and purplish indurated clays, of the Wasatch group of Miocene Tertiary. Summit County, Utah, 1869

Devils Gate Bridge. The most attractive feature of the canyon is the roar of the waters of the Weber as they roll over the immense masses of rock in its bed, with the rush and tumult of a mountain torrent. For 4 miles we are enclosed with nearly perpendicular walls of gneiss, 2,000 feet in height, forming the central portion of the Wasatch Mountains; the river rushing through it at right angles. The rocks are beautifully banded everywhere. There are also coarse aggregations of quartz and feldspar all along the sides of this channel; and high up on the steep mountain flanks are vast deposits of boulders and fine sand. Weber County, Utah, 1869

There would seem to loom only facts: that boulder, this mountain, these store fronts, his greed, her compassion, water, no water, prayer, arrogance, futility, loneliness, a swindle, an even break, the dandy charmer, the slothful soilbound fanatic, the dream and of course the inevitable dreamer. History has always seemed to me lying on the table, forgetful of age, or not present at all. And geography is not what's under your foot, that's simply the ground.

-- Edward Dorn: Idaho Out, 1965, Preface

The objects which exist together in the landscape exist in inter-relation. We assert that they constitute a reality as a whole that is not expressed by a consideration of the constituent parts separately, that area has form, structure and function, and hence position in a system, and that it is subject to development, change and completion. Without this view of areal reality and relation, there exist only special disciplines, not geography...

2 comments:

These images are like studies in that (literal)construction of geography that ED and Sauer speak of, and in the too often competing human/ecological significance of geometry and line: as commentary on that remarkable final image of the bridge, I wonder if I could put forward this, from AR Ammons's 'Corson's Inlet':

Dorn had come from a railroad town in Illinois; his father, a railroad brakeman, having drifted away shortly after his birth, he received a measure of protection in childhood from his maternal grandfather, a railroad man on the Illinois Central. He wrote this poem while residing in Pocatello, a UP railroad town. The poem remembers the monopoly ownership of the Union Pacific by the Harrimans, a family representing one of the great 19th c. American capital accumulations. In it he figures the railroad as an instrument of domination and division, apportioning western lands into determined corridors of power and turning open spaces into private tyrannies of ownership. The arrogance of attitude which would draw a straight line through the major landforms of a continent, and cut and blast its way through them for the sake of profit, stands plainly as a symbol of the bisected heart of not only a country as a geographical unit but of something larger.

A subplot in the poem (which is quite long, I've selected only the two small bits) brings in anecdotal evidence regarding a black photographer and friend of the poet then visiting Pocatello (they were to work together on a book about the Shoshonean tribe of the Fort Hall Reservation). In this regard the sundering tracks become emblematic also of "how many thousand years" of racial and territorial divisions, the boundary lines that partition-off white and black sections of the town -- or impose a borderline of cold distance between a sympathetic heart and its "desires". For Dorn that "other" side of the tracks would always be a district fraught with complex meaning, often occupied by those he loved.